Over the past few years, we’ve seen the onset of Social Media Managers and Community Managers to help orchestrate everything “social” for both corporations and agencies. If you have been on the outside looking in at this social media revolution, you might have heard that the person responding to you is a Community Manager and that they see you as a part of their corporate global community. This might catch you a little off guard. It might even make you wonder about this person’s role and why you are engaging with them. So why do we have these jobs with “Community” in the title? Why are we trying to control how customer relationships grow? Why do we care so much about managing the experience of our community?

Having a strong Community means that your customers have come together in a safe place to share experiences, good and bad, that you can learn from and that other social customers can build opinions on. The reasons for having people in these roles to manage your communities are countless but include customer support, being a knowledge and just plain being someone to reach out to when your customers are in need. If you want to know if your community needs this managing or if the managing you are doing is effective, just ask some of your clients these questions.

1. Do you feel like your voice is heard by us?

2. Would you recommend us to someone us?

3. How do you like connecting (phone, email, social channel) with us?

4. What ways could we improve the ways we connect?

5. What else could we do to improve your customer experience?

Simple though they may seem, questions like these are what are going to tell you if your clients feel like you are making them an integral part of your company giving them the one to one attention social demands or if there are areas where you could improve and help to build a stronger relationship.

Would you give these questions to your community to answer? Do you feel comfortable with the responses you think you would get? How would you answer these questions about Radian6?

Genevieve Coates is a Community Manager at Radian6. She’s a data geek who loves to talk so feel free to shout to @genevievecoates.

It’s time we face something about social media — it’s no longer a novelty or adjunct form of communication; social media is engrained into our daily lives and interactions. Whether you understand the business application of these tools or not, you have to admit the use of them is ubiquitous and that use is reshaping how we connect with each other on both individual and mass levels.

As businesses implementing social media strategies, we’re reaching past that point of overzealousness and blundering. Not everyone, mind you — the adoption curve is still steep – but those that jumped into the fray early on are finally finding their footing, and their customers are adjusting to that. This means consumers are becoming even savvier. We, as buyers, now have even higher expectations for being able to reach companies and get problems resolved, we are more scrutinizing and critical, and we have few if any qualms about publishing our criticisms on the Internet for the world to see. Because we know you’re listening.

So what does this mean for you, businesses? It means that you can’t just appear to have it all together on the social web. You might’ve been able to do that a couple years ago, but that’s no longer the case. You can’t just appease us by saying, “Yep, we heard you!” Great, you heard us, now do something about it.

Rather than go on in this vein and put the fear even deeper in you, let’s look at some ways you can adjust the inner workings of your business to make sure that what you’re hearing on the social web is being sent to the right people within your company and that there’s a process in place to either act on that information, log it for future review, or respond back with proper reasoning as to why it’s not possible.

Creating Your Internal Spokes

We’ve found that for ourselves and many other brands the hub-and-spoke model of internal structuring for social media adoption is one of the most effective ways for listening, acting on, and processing social media-based information. The hub of your social media efforts not only acts as an internal resource for social media adoption, they act as liaisons between your community and the various departments that make up your business.

While focusing on creating a strong and efficient social media hub is important, you can’t ignore the importance of selecting a strong lineup of spokes (e.g., department liaisons who act as points of contact for your social media team) to connect that hub to the rest of your organization. That selection process is almost more crucial than creating your hub, because those spokes will be the ones overseeing the information absorption process.

Some traits to look for in potential spokes include:

• The ability to communicate clearly and concisely and simplify concepts
• A strong understanding of social media and how people build relationships with each other and brands through these communication channels
• The ability to easily build relationships within your organization
• The willingness and confidence to go to whoever necessary within your organization to get answers
• A record of following through with requests in a timely manner
• An understanding of the customer’s perspective

If you can’t find all of those traits right from the get-go, identifying people who are enthusiastic about social media communication and are able to convey the needs of customers is a good start.

Mapping Your Processes

The information and opinions about your brands and products that come through the social media pipeline can be tagged with multiple labels. Some of that data is customer service oriented, some is product related, some relates to sales opportunities, and some might be more business development focused.

The mass amount of valuable feedback and qualified inquiries a company can receive via the social web makes it imperative you devise a well-mapped system that allows your hub and spokes to sort, organize, route, respond to, and track all of that in a timely fashion.

When creating this system, you’ll need to consider:

• The types/focus of comments and questions you receive
• The comments and questions that aren’t necessarily directed at you but are relevant to you
• Your organization’s current processes for resolving issues and receiving feedback through more traditional means of communication
• Setting external expectations with customers about your problem resolution timelines
• Setting internal expectations with departments about your problem resolution timelines
• Clearly identifying the people within your organization who are responsible for getting customer service issues resolved and feedback processed
• How you want to respond to different types of social media posts and brand-related topics
• In which social networks you want to be most responsive
• Which current information absorption processes can be streamlined to create a more efficient workflow
• How you want to track and log what comes through social media and how it’s handled internally

When you’ve considered these factors and more, go through the physical exercise of creating mapped social media processes. Developing a visual decision map can be extremely helpful in taking away any guessing as to who is responsible for what and speeding up the information absorption workflow.

There’s so much more to the picture, but these are starting points for you to think over. As mentioned above, consumer expectations are changing and you must adapt and amend your social media programs and processes to accommodate that change. What else would you add to these lists or to the bigger picture? How do companies need to adapt their internal structure, communication, and workflows to accommodate the influx of social media-based feedback and questions? Share your thoughts in the comments!

When we as businesses start or continue the discussion around the value of social media, inevitably the question comes up about sales. Can we sell in social media? Can the value in social media be translated to the cash register or the actual bottom line?

The simple answer is yes.

The more nuanced – and more important – answer is yes…but.

Sales and social media can work together. You can find prospects, talk with prospects, provide information.

The trick is that social media is rarely, if ever, the direct sales channel itself. Social media can increase the likelihood of sales through better targeting, more consistent touchpoints and availability of information, establishing affinities and relationships and all of the things that support the eventual transaction. Those are the same things we would want to do offline to nurture our prospects, but now we have more online channels to bridge those connections in both places.

Yet we’re so impatient to take the platforms social media provides and make them the direct marketing and revenue channel. But it’s not so easy.

Take something like Dell Outlet (disclosure: they’re a customer)? That’s an oft-cited example of empirical proof that social media can be a sales channel since the company reports millions of dollars in sales through that Twitter channel alone. But here’s an important qualification for that.

Dell spent not just months but years building their reputation, addressing customer concerns, offering up feedback channels, listening, participating, and contributing long before they ever made social media channels into a sales vehicle. They invested in their social media presence for a great deal of time – likely without much in the way of easily quantifiable dollar return – and saw the value in all of that first. They not only addressed the concerns and conversations happening within their community, but they spent time shoring up their website and e-commerce experience, providing lots of channels for discussion and feedback, listening and responding, all designed to enhance the journey toward the transaction rather than trying to be the destination.

Dell Outlet works because it’s been and continues to be buttressed by countless people, resources, and information that make it a single trusted channel among an ecosystem of investment in a community. But it’s really unlikely that you can replicate that singular piece with any success until you’re willing to methodically and patiently invest in the rest.

Instead, consider social media as the supporting cast for the sales process, and a way to enhance your prospects’ experience with your company so that the eventual sale feels like a natural, even welcome culmination to the relationship. Here’s a few ideas:

Finding the Point of Need: Listening carefully for when people are asking the right kinds of questions or seeking the sort of information that you can helpfully provide, which turns you into a problem solver instead of a pitch artist. It’s the difference between having your response or comment be an ill-timed interruption or a perfectly timed contribution. Not every mention of your company or competitor is the same as an expressed need, so study the difference and handle with care.

Being Responsive: Few things raise the hackles of people as much as the feeling of being ignored. Be there when someone is asking for you, answer inquiries in a timely fashion (on the web that usually means minutes and hours, not days), and you’ll already be ahead of the game. We don’t ever scold businesses for being too responsive when we’ve asked for their attention, so it’s a worthy goal to aim for. The web moves fast, so we as businesses need to be prepared for new notions of speed.

Availability (and Ease) of Information: Take care to make your website and social destinations user friendly and a fluid experience that reflects the focused needs and attention of social consumers. Have lots of resources front and center, and easy to find, whether it’s on your website or elsewhere. Make them easy to consume, download, and share (from file formats to concise writing and simple visuals). Focus on providing the information that your prospects want and are asking for (even if you didn’t create it!) not just the information you’re wanting them to see.

Being friendly: Amazing as it may seem, politeness, enthusiasm, and manners are not as ubiquitous as we’d like them to be. Teach your front line staff how to be gracious, helpful, and friendly on the web, even in the most trying of circumstances or in the presence of criticism or competition. Help them stay approachable and accessible in the places and ways that your customers are reaching out to you. And if you can’t teach them to do that, it’s time to get different staff to work the front lines of social media. It’s that important.

Focus on the In-Between: As businesses, we’re often myopically focused on the end of the line transaction. The sale. The close. But what we forget too often is that the sale is a momentary, and temporary point in time. It’s an important one, but the sustainability of a sale and a customer is only as good as the experiences between the transactions. Before the sale and after the sale. We spend most of our time as customers in the moments outside of the sale itself, yet we often treat those moments as merely the means to an end through our business lens. Shaping and nurturing the entire customer lifecycle is important, and the interactivity and pervasiveness of social media makes it beautifully suited for the task.

So can sales and social media co exist and even work together? Absolutely. But it requires all of us to remember that a sale is a multi-faceted thing with many variables along the way. And when we start seeing our sales as living, breathing cycles instead of instances that stop and start, we can start understanding and investing in all of the moments and experiences that make a sale a success.

What’s your experience with selling and social media? How are you seeing it done well, and what turns you off? Would you buy from you and why? I’d love to hear more of your take in the comments.

If actions speak louder than words, then it’s no surprise that customer service is playing a larger and larger role in peoples’ buying decisions. Today’s marketplace is packed with redundant products and services, so we turn to big-picture differentiators, like brand reputation and buying experience, to help us make purchasing decisions. This is also part of why we talk to our friends and networks about their experiences with a brand or product, and share our own experiences, as well.

Before the Internet, though, we’d tell a few friends about our fantastic or horrible experience with a brand, and they’d tell a few people, and eventually it would fizzle out, probably not having reached more than 20 people by the time the conversation died. But now, if we have a great (or equally bad) experience, we can share that experience in a blog post, a blog comment, a tweet, a video, a Facebook status update, and on and on, and that commentary could potentially be seen and shared by hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people.

That kind of mass exposure has a definitive impact on brand reputation and, ultimately, sales.

Now that your customers can have such a huge voice in the marketplace, it stands to reason that they need to be handled with a bit more care than the traditional customer service model allows. In the best case, that fantastic care you give will make your customers champions for your brand.

Customer Service is More Than a Department

Companies such as Zappos and L.L. Bean are known for their customer-focused business models. Everything they do, from pre-transaction to post-transaction is focused on making sure the customer experience is as high-quality as possible. Customer service for these companies is not just a department, it’s an important part of the corporate culture.

In these instances, because the customer service mindset lives outside the walls of a single department, the job of every employee to a certain extent is to speak on behalf of the customer. Internal and external conversations, marketing collateral, and larger business initiatives take into consideration the customer, making the entire system more inviting, personal, and people-friendly.

The Marketing Angle

At the end of the day, your business relies on relationships. People choose to buy from you because they like the relationship opportunity your brand presents — it feels good to them — and they come back because they get satisfaction from that relationship they’ve built with you. You’ve solved a problem of theirs and done it in a way that fits them.

To that end, strong relationships will always be talked about, be they with another person, a company, a product, or a service. We share the experiences we have in our relationships with others as a way to connect and relate, and the more extreme the experience (good or bad) the more it will get talked about.

Simply, if you provide top-notch customer service, people will talk about you. They’ll tell others about how well they were treated in your care, what they thought of your product or service, and if they’ll be going back to you for future purchases. With such good word being spread, others will be interested in your products and services, and they’ll seek you out, too.

Creating a positive and personal customer experience is a fantastic way to get people referring their friends, family, and larger networks to your company. The personal reference has power, and it’s one of the strongest marketing tools a brand can work to develop.

How are you improving customer service inside the walls of your company? How do you think those improvements will impact the way your customers, prospects, and community talk about you?

We’re excited that we’re finally launching a project we’ve had in the works for a while: a podcast! The Engaged Brand is focused on sharing stories, case studies, and best practices from brands who are embracing the potential of social media to connect with and engage their customers online.

We’re just getting ramped up so you’ll see more episodes coming down the pike in the near future, but what better way to kick off the series than with one of the brands leading the charge: Comcast.

Frank Eliason has demonstrated the power of Twitter as a customer service channel, and he’s sharing their successes and learnings at his speaking engagements across the country. His team has grown, their approach and strategy has evolved, and in this interview he shares with us some of the ways that Comcast has tapped social media to create a better, stronger customer experience.

So download the podcast and sit back and take a listen to The Engaged Brand: Comcast’s Frank Eliason, and share your thoughts!